The field of medical waste disposal is one looked at with great concern in today's environment. There is an increasing dichotomy between the need to bring effective, efficient and widespread medical attention to everyone, and the immense amount of volatile and hazardous waste generated by such widespread medical attention.
Medical attention is typically done in small selfcontained doctor's offices and clinics. In order to operate effectively, these offices and clinics must exist on a limited budget and use devices of limited complexity.
The known methods and devices used for medical waste disposal, however, are both complex and expensive. They also must be used in conjunction with special knowledge and equipment rendering them impractical for a small medical practitioner.
One such known device can be seen in U.S. Pat. No. 4,552,720, by Baker, Sr., et al. for "Debris Compressing Autoclave." The device shown in Baker is very complex (shown therein in FIG. 6), and requires a specially designed thermoplastic liner (shown therein in FIGS. 2 and 8).
The Baker apparatus has a built-in autoclave. Once the waste is introduced into the device, the device is sealed and the waste is autoclaved. After autoclaving, while the waste is still hot, the apparatus compacts the waste and thereby causes the thermoplastic liner to deform around the waste. This procedure limits the Baker apparatus to only one compaction per waste disposal cycle, and thereby limits the amount of waste the apparatus may handle.
The Baker apparatus is extremely complex, cost inefficient, requires special supplies and know how, and handles a low quantity of waste per disposal cycle. It is therefor unsuitable for the limited use a doctor's office may require.
A second such known device is described in U.S. Pat. No. 4,374,491, by Stortroen et al., for "Apparatus for Treating and Disposing of Bio-Hazardous Waste and Solid Waste." The Stortroen apparatus uses a complex set of chambers and pistons to autoclave waste and then move the waste around throughout the apparatus and into storage. The Stortroen apparatus requires a special "compactor storage device" (shown therein by numeral 41, in FIG. 2) for storage of the waste product and transportation to final disposal. This complexity and special storage apparatus makes the Stortroen device also unsuitable for usage in a doctor's office.
The inadequacies of these known medical waste disposals leaves individual medical practitioners with the choice of "red-bagging" hazardous waste in a special container for disposal purposes. "Red-bagging" requires special handling for disposal purposes because the waste is not sterilized or compacted in the doctor's office. "Red-bagging" has proven to be an unsatisfying method which is extremely harmful to the environment.
It is therefor an object of the present invention to provide a method and apparatus for the inexpensive, simple and safe disposal of solid and liquid medical waste for subsequent autoclaving prior to disposal.
It is a further object of the present invention to provide a method and apparatus for the disposal of solid and liquid medical waste which may be simply adapted to a doctor's office.
It is still a further object of the present invention to provide a method and apparatus for the disposal of solid and liquid medical waste which does not require using special equipment not already available in a doctor's office.
It is still a further object of the present invention to provide a method and apparatus for the disposal of solid and liquid medical waste which does not require any special knowledge to use.
Still further objects of the invention may be simply revealed to one skilled in the art through the following description of the invention and its embodiments.